WHY HONEY?
SIMPLE JOY
The simple joy and complex health benefits of honey are well known – humans have been consuming honey for thousands of years. Even ancient cave paintings showed humans collecting honey from a bee hive. In fact, birds called honeyguides even evolved to guide humans to a beehive, where people would smoke out the bees and take the honey, leaving the remnants to the bird.
USES & HISTORY
Honey’s best-known use is as a natural sweetener. Without the refined sugar we’re so accustomed to, ancient peoples around the world, from Egypt to China, Greece to Central America, honey would have been the primary source of sweet flavor.
But honey had other uses too, going back almost as long. One obvious application still widely believed effective today is to help a sore throat. Honey’s smooth, thick texture and exceedingly gentle sweetness makes it a wonderful balm for sore throats and even helps suppress coughs. In fact, many doctors believe that honey and gentle tea is likely just as effective as over-the-counter cough medicines in suppressing coughs and helping to reduce some of the discomfort of illness, and it helps to promote rest and relaxation without the use of chemical sedatives or sleep aids.
Honey was also long used to help clear up wounds, burns, and skin ailments. Not much is known about exactly how honey might manage to help close wounds wrapped in bandages or other issues, but research has shown that it likely has antimicrobial properties, and can form a protective barrier around hurt areas on the surface of the body that helps prevent infection and speed healing.
It’s no wonder that with all these uses, plus the curious way honey is produced in the wild, that humans would develop a deep reverence for this ancient superfood. It has been integrated into a wide range of religious texts and traditions, from the Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah, which features apples topped with honey, to the ancient Greek belief that honey was the gods’ favored snack, to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and others. It makes sense that we would see this delicious nectar, too perfect to have come from anywhere but nature itself, guarded by the fearsome, industrious bee and capable of healing wounds and soothing pain, as a gift from god.
It is with this reverence in mind that Royal Bee spotlights honey as its primary inspiration and the center of our mission. It is hard to imagine another symbol which promotes such appreciation of nature while fostering individual health and nutrition. We hope that honey and its creator, the bee, serves to inspire you as much as it does us.
